by Jean Case
• • •
Paul Rieckhoff never planned for his life to go the way it did. After graduation from Amherst, he headed for Wall Street. “For a while I was worried that my generation was going to be a generation where nothing important happened,” he told students in an address at his alma mater. “There was no call for us to answer.” Then 9/11 happened. Paul, who was in the National Guard as a “weekend warrior,” volunteered for the army and was sent to Iraq, where he served until 2004. He came home to a nation ill-equipped to serve this new generation of vets. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan soon came to realize they didn’t have an advocate to champion their unique needs and concerns.
While he was visiting Amherst, dressed in his military uniform, two Vietnam veterans Paul had never before met walked up to him on the street. “Welcome home, man,” they said. “Now we need you to serve again.” That was his inspiration for the creation of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).
For a long time, Paul felt like a voice in the wilderness. He recognized that while we as a nation are full of patriotic spirit in supporting soldiers when they march off to fight, we often lose interest when they return home with wounds and PTSD only to struggle rejoining the job market. Since its founding more than a dozen years ago, IAVA has become one of the most influential organizations championing support for veterans, with nearly half a million veteran members today. Paul’s mission is to bring the urgency felt on the battlefield back home, and his game-changing efforts have resulted in job programs, mental health resources, mentorship programs, and community-building initiatives.
It was the urgency of September 11 that originally caused Paul to shift gears and answer a call. Today it is the urgency of the plight of men and women who have selflessly served our nation that drives him forward. Knowing Paul, my bet is he won’t rest until the mission is accomplished.
It’s easy to think of first responders as bold and brash, people perhaps more brave than we see ourselves. The stories in this chapter teach us that anyone from anywhere can be a first responder to a crisis they witness. Is there an immediate or even ongoing crisis you are observing that is calling you to jump in and respond with action?
TWENTY-THREE
DON’T OVERTHINK OR OVERANALYZE. DO.
Much has been written about the difference between people who act with urgency and those who procrastinate. Perhaps Nike’s famous “Just Do It” slogan has a secondary message: “Don’t spend too much time thinking about it.” This would seem to contradict advice most of us have received along the way. Think of how many times you’ve heard, “Don’t be hasty!” or “Think this through carefully.” It’s no wonder that “Just Do It” doesn’t come naturally.
I realized there was value in both of these messages the first time I stood high in the air preparing to bungee jump. My brain was ordering me, “Don’t do it,” perhaps rightfully so. We want our brains to tell us not to take risks that could endanger us. But I had carefully considered the risk I was taking, and was convinced I would be safe. And so, counting down, “Three . . . two . . .one,” I jumped. That was nearly thirty years ago, and of course, it all worked out.
In her book The 5 Second Rule, Mel Robbins suggests that the “countdown approach” is a great “brain hack” to get things started if you’re feeling fear or stress or the urge to procrastinate. In the book’s opening, Robbins describes a period in her life when she couldn’t find the motivation to get out of bed. One morning, having watched a rocket launch the previous day, she found herself counting out loud—“Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one”—and vaulted out of bed. For Robbins, this moment was life-changing. In an interview with Inc. magazine, she describes the countdown approach this way: “When you act with courage, your brain is not involved. Your heart speaks first, and you listen. . . . The five seconds is critical in both triggering the fast-acting part of your brain as well as limiting the influence of the slow-acting part of your brain. Decide and act.” Once triggered, she said, you can use the next five minutes to focus on whatever you’re fearful of doing. “As long as you make that five-second decision to commit five minutes, you will have broken the cycle and proven that you can confront the stress.”
In their book Fail Fast, Fail Often, authors Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz reflect on a series of research studies in a segment entitled “Too Much Thinking Can Stop You in Your Tracks.” In summarizing the studies’ findings, they conclude that “the more time you spend collecting information and making choices:
• the more confused and hesitant you will become;
• the more likely you will be to stick with the status quo and ignore better options;
• the more likely you will be to allow trivial factors to bias your behavior;
• the less energy you will have to take action and persevere in the face of challenges.”
This is intriguing data, and it might help to alleviate some stress for people who have no choice but to act now, as was the case during one of our nation’s worst financial crises. At the end of 2008, with the economy in free fall, General Motors was on the verge of collapse; by the end of the year, GM was more than $30 billion in debt. At the end of his administration, President George W. Bush approved a short-term $17 billion bailout, which would keep the lights on but not solve the crisis.
In February 2009, with a new administration in the White House, GM chairman Rick Wagoner came to Washington to meet with President Obama’s auto task force and beg for help. Insolvency would mean not only the loss of tens of thousands of jobs at companies like General Motors and Chrysler, but also at their suppliers. But a bailout wasn’t popular with Congress. Many believed GM was a victim of its own poor management, and that as a private company, it should bear the consequences of its choices.
Faced with having to make a fast decision, President Obama and his economic advisors decided to make a Big Bet and approve an $85 billion bailout of GM and Chrysler. There was no way to know if this would pointlessly drain public coffers or revitalize the auto industry. But the risk of not acting was devastating, so urgency conquered fear.
And it worked. President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s willingness to act bolstered the economy and saved one of America’s leading industries. But as Geithner notes: “You can’t judge a decision by how it turns out, only by whether it made sense given the information available at the time.”
This same spirit of urgency was present in another fearless effort undertaken by President Obama and his team. Concerned about opportunity gaps facing boys and young men of color, and with a goal of assuring that all youth have the opportunity to reach their full potential, President Obama announced the creation of My Brother’s Keeper, an initiative that galvanized the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to work on these issues. The initiative led to the creation of the MBK Alliance, launched in 2015 to scale and sustain this mission. In late 2017, MBK Alliance became an initiative of the Obama Foundation. The Case Foundation’s very own Michael Smith was first tapped to help lead this effort from the White House and today serves as the executive director of the MBK Alliance. (Michael played an important role in helping us to develop our original Be Fearless work and in spreading its message.) He is uniquely suited to lead MBK Alliance, having overcome significant odds himself as a young man growing up in challenging circumstances. He’s a true innovator, and anyone who knows him sees how he lives with a sense of urgency in addressing issues in our communities, and how he brings a fearless spirit to his work every day.
It’s easy enough to see how “Just Do It” thinking can come more naturally in the heat of the moment, but there are countless stories of people one step removed from crises who still find a way to jump in with urgency to make a difference.
In 1954, Bertha and Harry Holt—she a nurse, he a farmer and lumberjack—sat in disbelief in a high school auditorium in Oregon as they listened to a talk by Dr. Bob Pierce, a young pastor who had recently founded a new relief organization
, World Vision. As United Nations forces, most of them American, withdrew from the Korean Peninsula following the Korean War, many children born to Korean mothers and fathered by soldiers were abandoned. Dr. Pierce showed a heart-wrenching film about these homeless children, who were considered outcasts by their society because of their supposed “mixed blood.”
The Holts, who were in their fifties, had known struggles of their own in the Great Depression, having left a failed farm in the Midwest to build a successful sawmill business in Oregon. When a heart attack left him in a wheelchair in 1950, Harry sold the business and began rebuilding his strength. Grateful for his recovery, Harry told Bertha he wanted to spend the days ahead showing his appreciation for God’s goodness to him.
Moved by the images of abandoned Korean children on the screen, the Holts began sending donations to World Vision. But they couldn’t get the desperate children out of their minds. So with six children of their own, some of whom still lived at home, they decided to adopt eight Korean children. But when they tried to arrange the paperwork, they were thwarted by a law that limited foreign adoptions to one child per family. Told it would require an act of Congress to change the law, Bertha replied, “Then that’s what we’ll do.”
While Harry left for Korea to begin arranging adoptions, Bertha launched a lobbying campaign in Congress. The so-called Holt Law was signed in 1955, and the Holts added eight children—newborns and toddlers—to their family. But their efforts didn’t end there. By the following year, the Holts were running an adoption agency out of a Salvation Army building to help bring more children to America and to aid in domestic adoption. But they found that children with disabilities or special needs could not easily find homes. So in late 1961, they broke ground on a residential facility in Seoul, financed by the sale of their sawmill business. Harry died suddenly not long after, but Bertha launched the effort and she found success, continuing until her death in 2000. She was known in Korea as Grandma Holt.
“A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.”
—MAHATMA GANDHI
In 2017, I visited the compound in Seoul, together with a close friend—a Holt adoptee herself. The facility is now run by the Holts’ daughter Molly, who is eighty. I was especially moved by the Holt Agency Museum, a tribute to the founders and their work, located on the property. The entry wall of the museum displays thousands of tiny images of orphans adopted over time. The collage of these photos forms three words: “Love in Action.” We strolled the halls filled with memorabilia, stories, and documentation of tens of thousands of lives that were changed because of the caring, compassionate commitment of a humble couple from Eugene, Oregon. They did more than take action; they started a movement.
• • •
Marta Gabre-Tsadick has spent decades working to improve the lives of the people of Ethiopia. Together with her husband, Deme Tekle-Wold, she founded Project Mercy, a nonprofit organization providing food, education, job training, and health care for Ethiopians and refugees from other African nations. When Steve and I first visited Marta in 2004, the urgency was a growing famine that was sweeping across the country. I’d learned about Marta from my friend Billy Shore, cofounder of Share Our Strength, who had been raising funds in the US to aid the efforts on the ground in Ethiopia, and we had joined in the effort. I told Billy that I wanted to better understand the challenges and opportunities in Ethiopia, and he had two words for me: “Just go.” So we did.
I can still remember the bumpy four-hour car ride spent dodging cattle and goats along a crowded dirt road as we made our way out to the remote village of Yetebon. When we finally stepped out of the dust-covered truck, I was immediately struck by Marta’s gentle spirit and a beauty that seemed to glow from within as she greeted us.
We were also intrigued by her long and impressive history of engagement. Marta was already married with two children when she left Ethiopia to attend college in the United States, returning home in 1954 to serve as director of Ethiopia’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs under the famed Emperor Haile Selassie. She later became the nation’s first female senator. But when civil war broke out in 1974 and the emperor was placed under house arrest by the new Communist regime, Marta, Deme, and their children were forced to flee, as their own lives were at risk. After months of uncertainty living as refugees in Greece, they were allowed to enter the United States, thanks to the generous sponsorship of a community in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where, slowly, they began to rebuild their lives. Ever mindful of those they’d left behind, they founded Project Mercy.
In the early 1990s, Ethiopia’s Communist government was toppled, and Marta and Deme returned to their homeland to expand Project Mercy’s work. They built a compound that would grow through the years to include a school, a job training center, a hospital, and an orphanage. In 2013, members of the US House and Senate and the director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) came to Project Mercy to see firsthand the important work taking place. Later, announcing a four-year, $2 million commitment to expand Project Mercy’s health-care services and nutrition programs, USAID director Rajiv Shah lauded Marta’s “holistic program that doesn’t treat individuals as beneficiaries but rather as real partners in the development of vibrant communities in Ethiopia. All you have to do,” he continued, “is meet people like Marta and Deme to know that the future of development lies in their hands, not ours.”
The mission of Project Mercy is not just about providing food during a famine or addressing each crisis as it comes. “In order to fight against poverty, you have to attack it from many different directions and then pluck it out,” Marta has said. “We cannot educate children if the only outcome is to make them discontented with the limited job opportunities currently available to them. We cannot just treat symptoms of malnutrition in the clinic and not also improve nutrition and agricultural production. We cannot teach good hygiene practices if people still need to bathe and drink from the same contaminated water supply. Clean water piped into each home is possible only if economic conditions are improved for the entire community.”
People like Harry and Bertha Holt and Marta and Deme model lives lived with urgency, even if the commitment stretches over decades or generations. And over the years, their actions coalesced into something even bigger than simple philanthropy. They became movement-building.
“One thing that movements do is come up with ways to make the important urgent,” Marshall Ganz, a senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School, has noted. He was talking about climate change, which, while surely urgent, has effects that reveal themselves slowly over time and as a result can be less obvious to some.
One of the lessons he draws from his decades working in and studying social movements is that only moral urgency can move individuals to act. This deeply felt passion for justice and action is often accompanied by hope, or the sense of possibility. “If you look at the core of any social movement, there are highly committed people who are ready to take risks,” he says. “It’s not just about passing a law—at heart they are movements of moral reform.”
In the dark of night, each of us may wonder, “Would I have the courage to step up and act when the time comes?” Yet moments of urgency don’t just occur when storm troopers arrive at the door.
In 1910, after serving eight years as president, Theodore Roosevelt gave a groundbreaking speech about the tension between those who criticize and complain and those who jump in, against the odds and in spite of fear. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better,” he said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy
cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Roosevelt may have spoken of “the man,” but today his call goes out to all who hear the whisper or the shout and are inspired.
Noted professor, author, and speaker Brené Brown was thinking of Roosevelt’s call when she wrote Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Brown, who often focuses on the crippling effects of shame and fear, believes that daring greatly requires setting aside self-doubt and refusing to allow uncertainty to give you pause. She writes, “When we spend our lives waiting until we’re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, our unique contributions that only we can make.”
As the stories in this chapter demonstrate, urgency can be a powerful motivator to fearlessly get in the arena. Is there something in your life that is so important it can become an urgent call to act? Consider Marta, threatened and removed from her homeland. Rather than run away or cower, she instead acted with urgency to help create a better future for others. The Holts knew young lives hung in the balance in Korea and jumped in to make a difference for all time. Teddy Roosevelt’s famous speech reminds us that despite difficulties, despite failures and shortcomings, we can all make the choice to strive valiantly. It is up to each one of us to let the urgency of the moment conquer our fears and drive us forward.
